April 8, 2018 • 44 mins
The weekly round up of the best moments from DZ's Season 25 (4/2/18-4/6/18.)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello the Internet, and welcome to this episode of the
Weekly Zeitgeist. Uh. These are some of our favorite segments
from this week, all edited together into one uh NonStop
infotainment last stravaganza. Uh yeah, So, without further ado, here
(00:22):
is the Weekly Zeitgeist. So we wanted to start off
with a video that went viral over the weekend that
was made by actually the video director of dead Spin, uh,
Timothy Burke. It's like a super cut of all these
local news stations who were given the same script from
(00:43):
Sinclair Media, where they're basically making a commentary on how
the mainstream media is lying to people. Which is interesting
because the Sinclair Broadcasting Group they own right now about
like a hundred seventy three affiliate stations around the country,
and there's a merger right now that they're trying to
get pushed through which would combine them with Tribune Media,
(01:06):
and that would mean that seven out of ten households
in this country would be served by a Sinclair station
in some form. So I guess the way to think
of it is because Sinclair owns all these local news stations,
they can tell all these news stations what to say
during their broadcast. It's not ABC or NBC or CBS
or whatever. It's at the affiliate stations. The ownership is
(01:27):
the ones that are giving these directives straight down to
the anchors, and a lot of anchors were very uncomfortable
with having to do what they call these must read segments.
And this was a must read coming from on high
from Sinclair, which is a right leaning Trump friendly media group,
so leaning exactly. So you'll see when they're vampires, vampires
(01:49):
that live in cofference. Yeah, and then they're basically trying
to gaslight the entire country. So basically, this is a
super cut of one of the scary messages about fake news.
It's out there, but when you cut them on together
and realize they're all lockstep saying the same thing, it's
fucking scary. So check this out. I am Fox and
Antonio's Jessica Headley and I'm Ryan Wolf. Our greatest responsibility
(02:11):
is to serve our treasure. Valley communities, deal pass a
LUs Crucis communities, Eastern Eye with communities, Mid Michigan communities.
We're extremely proud of the quality, balanced journalism that CDs
four News produces, but in country plaguing our country, sharing
of biased and false news has to become all too
(02:34):
common on social media. More alarming, some media outlets publish
the same fake stories without checking facts first. The sharing
of biased and false news has become too common on
social media. Qualities are without checking first, unfortunatelyforms their own
(02:59):
and amend and controlling and extremely dangerous. This is extremely
dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
This is extremely dangerous to its extremely democracy. This is
extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to
(03:19):
our democracy. Yes, so that is extremely dangerous. Yeah, so
basically right now, So imagine if this merger goes through,
they will control two stations, and Tribune Media also holds
a lot of stations in swing states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina,
Ohio and also massive markets like New York, Chicago in
l a um so, more than likely all you Americans
(03:42):
night getting people out there probably live in a Sinclair market. Uh.
And most people get their news still from their local
news because they still feel they can trust it, because
they're like, oh, these are people from my town. They're
not getting their fucking orders from somewhere else. Right. That
is rapidly changing when we focus on news bias we
tend to focus on now sational news Fox News versus
you know, the right focuses on CNN. But yeah, local
(04:05):
news is widely biased in some cases. And uh, you know,
when you look at, for instance, the number of how
they report on crime, there's a huge bias towards reporting
crimes by people of color, Like the crimes they put
on the local news will be people of color, and
only like ten percent of the crimes committed are people
(04:26):
of color. Right, And I mean this is a logical
evolution from the traditional conservative media strategy, which is they
have the money. The right always has more money. So
that's you saw this happen in talk radio right once
the last time you heard a left voice on the radio. Yeah,
because we're on podcasting exactly. It's true. I think people
(04:49):
got into podcasting, and podcasting is partially growing because there
wasn't a left alternative to uh, you know, local talk radio.
And you're seeing this now like luckily, right, like our
generation and the generation that comes after us, uh doesn't
watch local news, which is good. Like this strategy. As
(05:11):
as terrifying as that video was to hear, and it
was really scary, like you know, yeah, it's like some
fucking orwelling, and it really was. But the thing to
remember is just like, Okay, don't watch local news. Wait
you don't already, great, keep not watching local news. I
think it's important though, too, because most people will have
to interact at some point with someone who watches this.
It takes it for reality. And what's crazy is a
(05:35):
few people, like in full Wars types dudes, were retweeting
it with no context, being like, check this out. And
the response from a lot of people on the right
was like, yes, you check out the mainstream media. They're
all fucking brainwashed. And then like other people in the
twitter threads would be like, you know, this is owned
by a conservative guy and it's pro Trump propaganda arm
and their weaponizing your local news. And they were like, well,
(05:57):
all I'm seeing is CBS, ABC, AN, NBC. Tell me
how this is like right leaning. They're all against Trump
and a lot of people you have to understand get it.
Affiliate news stations are independently owned, but they just have
an agreement with CBS. They'll be like, okay, funk with
you will air your shows, but we'll do the local news.
We'll put the CBS logo on it. But you don't
tell us what to run, because that's just part of,
(06:18):
you know, keeping CBS from controlling all the news everywhere.
So with these independent stations, they actually do get their
marching orders from Sinclair, which is why they post shit
like the other must runs have been stuff like the
me too movement is getting out of control and like yeah,
or just like mentioning stories that are in another state,
like you'll be in Tulsa and they'll be talking about
someone in St. Louis who got their job taken away
(06:40):
because they're conservative. So yeah. But the silver lining on
this is that the people watching local news are dying
because they are really dumb and have gutted our healthcare system.
So the only old people, and they're dying at a
rapid rate. The death rate is going up and people
(07:00):
aren't going to live as long as they did before.
So I think we're in the clear. If we all die,
we don't have to deal with this problem. Unfortunately, there
was a report released last week that says that news
that is fake travels way faster and way further on
Twitter and social media, essentially, because that's really damn That
(07:23):
is an actual study by m I T was basically
two guys who experienced the Boston bombing living in Boston,
and we're like, you know, the only place you could
get reports was on social media. So they saw, like
you know, that what they read was fake. So they
did h A. They basically ingested all of Twitter from
(07:43):
two thousand six to two thousand six and exactly uh,
and they found that stories that were fake traveled faster,
got more retweets, got more likes, And they were like, yeah,
it kind of makes sense because fake stories are able
to say whatever the funk they want to write. Yeah,
so it's just wish fulfillment, right. So I think this
(08:03):
is a problem in any medium. That that's the thing
about this particular story that they did the illustration about,
because it could go either way. They're talking about fake news,
which is something the right also talks about. So that's
why I think they're able to be like, well, what
they're talking about CNN or they say talking about Fox News.
(08:25):
We won't say pizza gate, but we'll misinform you well.
And then some of these guys have done pizza Gate stories,
some of these affiliates, Like I remember last year there
was a story where what are these like guys on
the local news was very plainly all right and just
reporting on pizza Gate as though it was a real thing.
Sinclair Executive forced their stations to run pro Trump and
(08:48):
anti Clinton segments during their evening and morning local news programs.
It's just that this was the one that they sent
out that was a word for words script that they
had to read sort of uh, you know, casting expersions
on the national news that people got, which you know,
and a lot of anchors have problem with it because
(09:10):
they're like, this is not fucking like you know what
I mean, Like the few people that are left that
are like, this is fucked Like, we can't just be wholesale.
We're counting on our We're counting on our local run
burgundies like be the voice of reason and the Edward
Armorrows to stand up. That's amazing. Yeah, I cannot wait
for that. Like I want to see them March. I
(09:30):
want to see their strike. I want to see them
former union more at ten We're hell no, we won't go. Yeah,
we'll see if we're gonna have a sick and tired
and not gonna take it anymore moment coming out on
one of these broadcasts in December Kushner bragged that the
Trump campaign had struck a deal with Sinclair executives to
(09:51):
provide exclusive interviews during the primaries and presidential campaign, and
Sinclair agreed to run them as is without any commentary. Cool.
So yeah, so that one, there's one side for you,
if nothing else, that shows the power of Sinclair Media.
That clip, and based on what they've done in the past,
it's clearly going to be a problem for democracy. The
(10:14):
Trump I want to see it go as far right
as it can go. I want to see some fucking
you know dude named like Chuck mcgonicall just be like
now more with the weather. Here's a jew. It's just
like a guy dressed like a rabbi, Like just like
my rabbi from my bar was like, you know, I
I'm feeling because I can control it. I'm feeling right.
(10:36):
Tomorrows does about the chem trail report? Right, Oh, well,
we're putting him out there and we're making him make
you gay, So good luck. So that's a stay indoors
warning from weather Rabbi, the weather Jew. So yesterday there
was a active shooter on the YouTube campus in northern California. UM.
(10:58):
It was one of the those situations, where as the
story was developing, we were getting updates on Twitter about
you know, facts that people on the ground knew that
turned out to be completely false, that it was like
a love triangle thing. I think that was started by
CNNs like expert on uh something and uh, like the
(11:21):
front page of Drudge Report is covering this to make
it seem like the shooter, which was a woman for once,
was this like right when I heard about the actor shooter,
I was like, oh my god, like who isn't It's
like it's a woman. I was like, oh, so she
has got a reason. It was like instantly really right. Uh.
(11:42):
But so the way the right is responding to the
shooter is, uh, you know, on the front page of
Drudge you see it covered as both uh you know,
portraying her as this like freaky, deaky leftist who was
into weird sexual stuff and Peter like the quote on
(12:03):
the front page of drudges wants you to be sex slaves,
which she actually like advocates for abstinence. So I don't
see how that is they too, I think something out
of contexts the system wants you to be sex slaved
or something like that. But wants you to be sex
to make it seem like she was into some weird
leftist sexual thing, but no, she was actually pro abstinence.
(12:28):
But basically her motives, it seems like we're actually based
on YouTube. She thought that YouTube was you know, demonetizing
and hiding her channel from her audience and wasn't giving
her good enough placement in search results essentially, which is
a complaint that you hear people a lot of YouTube, Yeah,
(12:49):
from a lot of YouTube users. And uh, Incredibly, when
you go to the Drudge Report, one of the top
headlines basically agrees with her. It's like oppressive YouTube censorship
policies spill over to violence, so they're actually blaming YouTube
policies for the shooter rather than being like, well, she
(13:11):
was clearly disturbed. Um so, Jared, you were talking about
you wrote an article kind of covering the way this
was covered on the right because there was just a
lot of misinformation throughout the day, right, Yeah, and then
there's a lot of stuff just made up, like that
whole peda like animal rights activist thing. Like I was
(13:33):
kind of surprised. My girlfriend is vegan and I had
no idea she was like a radical leftist right until
I saw the right wing coverage. But what interesting thing
is like, even with the Drudge like you're saying, how
they're talking about they bring up the censorship angle, right,
And it seems like even when I was reading the
post you wrote today Jared about it, like how they're
(13:55):
sort of taking the censorship tak with this too, and
they're being like, see what happens when you censor people,
Like they break and they start attacking, and like they're
using like the hashtag censorship kills the sort of way
to spin it, Like is that a pretty popular tack
that people have been taking with this. I mean, it's
it's kind of weird, Like some people um in right
wing media have really sort of stepped away from going
(14:18):
on that angle, but a lot of them, uh, are
really going into it that, you know, really trying to
prop up the fact that the shooter had uploaded videos
on her channel being like super critical of YouTube steam
monetization and like essentially like d prioritization of videos that
(14:44):
had any sort of controversial topic, which has been like
a huge thing in conservative media for the last few months.
But that was kind of weird to me because you
know that Alex Jones Is of the World have spent
the last especially couple of months really ramping up the
red rick for that being like being like, oh, if
we're censored, this is life or fucking death or something,
(15:05):
you know, and like claiming that tech companies want to
like murder Christians and stuff. It's crazy would think that
they yeah, you would think they would just like bolt running,
yeah from that storyline, but they're actually being like, yeah,
this is what happens. Uh. That top story on Drudge
Report links through to a PJ Media story where there
(15:29):
they talk about how she was motivated by censorship of
her YouTube channel and then talk about a Trump supporting
woman whose channel was like hidden they say, and just yeah,
connecting themselves to the complaints of a shooter. Like rather
than being like, wow, this has gotten way out of hand,
(15:50):
they're just like kind of on board with it. Yeah.
And I think it's because like a lot of alternative
media types, like the type of content creators that like
will never be on Fox News or never be you know,
talking to Russia Limbaugh, all they have as a YouTube channel,
The thought of like getting demonetized on YouTube is so
it's their life, and uh, I think what we're seeing
(16:15):
is them getting incredibly desperate because it takes a lot
of mental gymnastics, is at least like from my perspective,
to align yourself with a shooter and sort of you know,
issue this sort of dark I don't want to say warning,
but you know what I mean, where is well there
is insisting that insisting like this is what you get
(16:36):
when you try to do this right. I mean, my
own YouTube videos have um, you know, dozens of hits
and um, you know, I don't have many subscribers, but
it makes me, it makes me have a murderous blood
lusts and that's totally justified. Totally yeah. I mean, your
art is your life, and they're trying to take away
(16:57):
your life and therefore, uh no, it one thing that
I actually agree with on the organization. By the way,
when I say Drudge has this, Drudge just organizes different
stories and then rewrites the headlines for them. So I'm
not saying Drudge is writing these things. He's organizing the stories,
but he has underneath, like the top story claiming you know,
(17:19):
this is YouTube's doing and they had it coming. He
has a story about how basically the two sides in
America are more polarized than they've ever been. This is
a claim by a physicist, which is something you hear
a lot, but this physicist, UH points out that we're
consuming more news than we've ever consumed before, and we're
(17:40):
getting more and more polarized, like even now, we're getting
more polarized than we were even like a couple of
months ago. And I think that really seems to be
I don't know, it seems like we've turned a corner.
Like we we were talking about the Q and on
thing being fringe, but there was just a study that
I talked about earlier this week where people ingested all
(18:01):
of Twitter from UH two thousand six to two sixteen
and looked at which stories traveled the most, and the
stories that were lies traveled the best because they were
wish fulfillment to people who, you know, wanted their beliefs confirmed.
And I just think that as we get more polarized,
the more we need fake stories to be true to
(18:22):
confirm our beliefs. So there's going to be this economy
of fake news stories that just kind of bubbles up
because that's what the sort of landscape demands. All Right,
We're gonna take a quick break and we'll be right back,
(18:47):
and we're back. The debate surrounding news I feel like
hasn't evolved with the world we now live in. I
think we still talk about stories and like whether they're
true or false, Like the Sinclair thing they were, like,
you know a lot of people have bias and tell
these fake stories just based on their bias, and um
(19:10):
So I've talked before about how nine eleven. The big
problem with our ability to stop the September eleventh attacks
and in the aftermath of the September eleventh attacks was
our ability to basically sort through all the data that
we had. Like during the Cold War, intelligence gathering was
(19:30):
a big thing. It was just like you got these
few scraps from your Russian spies and then like you
put them together into a coherent picture. And suddenly, with
the advent of like information technology, we had just fire
hoses of information coming at us, and we didn't know
how to sort through all that information. And that made
it so that we didn't get to the nine eleven
(19:54):
attackers before it happened, because we knew about that, Like
that was a story you heard in the aftermath, like
how did we knew about these people, but we didn't
stop them. It was because they were like one of
thousands of things we knew about. And I feel like
the same thing is happening with how we addressed news,
Like we have just all this news coming at us now,
(20:16):
and the question is not like whether some of it
is false or whether some of it is true all
the time, but rather like what we choose to focus on,
And like this story about the border caravan, you know,
people are focusing on this like it is this unprecedented
thing and it's something that's happened every year, and yes
(20:39):
it's happening, and yet like they're not making the story up,
but by focusing on it, they're misleading you. It's basically well,
and it's a story that is like we now have
a president where this kind of story is politically advantageous
to the president because he can weaponize and distort it
to evoke like this idea that like if it's you know,
other countries they have refugees arriving on boats and they're like, oh,
(21:01):
people are just crashing the shores and trying to get
in our country or or storming the gates of our
borders and things like that, and this is like kind
of that perfect imagery that he needs, and then he
can like pump his own dick up and be like, oh,
you know, I told Mexico to break up the caravans,
and they did because I told him, And now we'll
have the military there to fucking shoot people who are
seeking political sound like, what the funk are you going
on about? It's it's very weird. And I think another
(21:24):
reason too, is we also don't actually we just focus
on what is happening and not focusing on what is
the root cause. Right, So, like, if it's these migrants,
why don't you doing some more stories about Honduras and
what it is these people are trying to escape because
that might resonate or that might at least help people
understand the world we live in, because everything isn't just
(21:45):
what happened or what might happen this season on the
New Jersey Shore, which I am very much interested in,
but I also want to know why people are moving
and with the situations they're trying to escape. And I
think that's another way our media does betray us, or
as a disservice, is might not actually focusing on like, oh, well,
why is this happening, not just it is happening, just
being like oh that's and also overarching, like we need
(22:08):
to look at statistics, like just because the local news
reports a crime doesn't mean that there aren't fewer crimes happening.
Like crime is at an all time low, but the
way that people talk on Fox News and just looking
at your local news, you would never suspect that crime
is an all time low. Way, but it's at an
(22:28):
all time low, and it has been going down for
years because of you know a number of different factors
that people never mentioned, and they don't mention those overall
statistical trends because it's more interesting and just more consumable
to tell the bite size stories of the crimes. Right.
I feel like we've lost a lot of empathy in
(22:48):
this nation, and there's no focus on mental health. I
think like a lot of these like news channels, they
always yeah, I agree, like it's sensationalize is crime, but
some some people just need like mental health services. And
instead of just being like this is a crazy man,
like hey, wait, like someone who the system failed. Wait
a second, you know, yeah, man too brings that up,
(23:11):
you know, sensationalizing mental health, that's pretty deep when Kanye
came out. I mean, everything we're saying is basically summarizing
the points made an anchor man. They don't give away
the secret to our philosophical north star is little no effect.
(23:32):
But yeah, I think that's another reason too that we
we never really give people context, like we expect people
to already know or we have to explain to them,
like you know, especially when you think about how segregation
works in this country, A lot of people just go, oh,
like an unarmed black person was shot or whatever, and
not many people understand how through like legal segregation, through
(23:53):
like housing initiatives in this country and the highways. Yeah exactly,
we were redlining. We were making sure and and we
talked about this yesterday. But redlining was the practice of
identifying neighborhoods that were undesirable or where people would not
get loans and things, basically essentially to just say, keep
black people in these sections, or keep minorities in these neighborhoods,
(24:14):
and if they try and get out, just deny them
alone or give it at such a rate that it's
not really it's an untenable situation for them. And yeah, exactly,
And what people don't realize is that, like especially like
as a lot of black people migrated to the North
out of the South in the early twentieth century for like,
you know, industrial centers like my grandparents did. They moved
(24:34):
to Chicago from the South, Chicago the Dan Ryan and
in those neighborhoods. The way they were dealing with this
influx of of people of color was, you know, they've
just created these very distinct neighborhoods that they segregated people.
And the segregation is much more intense. Like you think, oh,
in the South, it must be crazy. No, it's actually
like the Northeast and ship and some in the in
(24:56):
the Midwest, that's where it's the most pronounced. This American
Life did under cover story where they sent people. They
send people to enquire about apartments in New York City,
and it was white couple and then a black couple.
And they would go and the black couple had better credit,
better all the things that the landlord was supposed to
(25:19):
be looking for, and they would be turned away and
the white couple would be shown the apartment and basically
courted to go there. And so that's the way that
these things are enforced. It's like sort of a soft
form of segregation where it or like an invisible form
of segregation. It's not soft in the sense that it's
easy to get around well, and people who don't realize,
(25:39):
they're like, oh, those people are just poor and that's
why they live there. It's like, no, that area is
designed to keep people in there and not coming into
other areas, because whether it's like blockbusting practices or like
black people would begin to move into white places, and
those realtors would hire black people to create this illusion
of like a black takeover and like being like, hey,
you probably want like to a white family, Hey, you
probably want to sell your home, and then jack up
(26:01):
the price for a black family to buy that home. Also,
like you also think about how schools and services get funded.
A lot of it's from property taxes too, So if
you're in the hood, there's not a lot of tax
revenue being generated, so that means the schools are underfunded.
That means the schools get more segregated. And again we
just want to act like it's it's all these other things. Again,
I think a lot of the times when we present stories,
(26:21):
people don't fully understand the context of even how we
get the situation. And like, one other point I want
to bring up is that, like one theory that is
going around is that obviously not it's like the theory,
but you know a lot of people are sort of like,
why does you know black white segregation have any kind
of bearing or influence on fatal police shootings? What's that
segregated Black communities are just more heavily policed than others.
(26:43):
And in a study from thirteen showed that in Milwaukee
in Wisconsin has the highest like sort of like racism
racial index. Uh. It's it's a state racism index where
it basically takes uh it looks at things like residential segregation,
disparities and educational attainment and employment status, economic status, incarceration status. Uh,
(27:03):
and they score each of these Wisconsin tops the list
for all of these for when you when they factor
all these things in and when they looked at Milwaukee specifically,
the state's largest city, half of black men between the
ages thirty and forty have been in jail at some
point in their lives and the city zip code five
three two oh six black and has the highest incarceration
rate like anything in any county there. So basically what
(27:26):
happens is the more segregated a place becomes your only
underlying people's biases that are fed by the news. Where
if you if you think, oh, you're only showing news
about people of color or like the violence being bad
in like uh in these neighborhoods, then immediately the police
are going to be like, oh, well, now I'm in
a black neighborhood. I'm not in oh I deal with
regular people who might not have to get shot. I'm
immediately on the defense because now I'm in this crazy thing.
(27:48):
And like there's all these subtle factors all play into
sort of how we relate to the world. And yeah,
I think it's a very important thing for people to
kind of realize all of these stories have much more
complex context. I feel like that's really like I lived
in Chicago for about ten years before I moved out here,
and like Rama Manual is just systematically shutting down schools
like an impoverish neighborhoods, and then I just pulled it up,
(28:10):
like Chicago closes more schools and black neighborhood Chicago students
had budget cuts. It's all of this stuff, like and
then there are these like some of my friends were teachers,
and I don't know if this is true or not,
but they were telling me that um Ram had this
like initiative of like, look, we're building new schools and
new charter schools, but these schools were empty because he
was adding them in neighborhoods that didn't need them, or
(28:31):
like prominent neighborhoods where like neighborhoods on the West Side
or even the south side, and and some up in
the north like an uptown where you really needed it,
they weren't getting them and he was just shutting them down. Yeah,
I mean, and in Chicago, like a story that I
hadn't really connected to the current spade of violence and
(28:51):
murder was that they shut the Cabrini Green housing project
down like a number of years ago, and that was
a high crime area, but they basically turned it into
high income a living area and didn't give all the
poor people who had lived there before a place to go.
So like that created just a horrible Yeah. So I
(29:14):
don't know, these are, uh, we're kind of all over
the map, but I do just want to talk about
Jeff Bezos. You're just listening in Jeff Bezos. It was
a problem Jeff, he started this whole thing. But I
do think, you know, it's important to keep in mind
that the our role as news consumers is not just
to look at individual stories and determine, you know, whether
(29:37):
they're true or not, but to actually find the context.
And you know, the Redlining story is a story that
I just learned about on that this American Life episode
like four or five years ago, and I believe that
I couldn't believe that I hadn't been told that that's
like the most important story of the twentieth century when
(29:59):
it us to like how American life has lived in
the current world, and it puts all these different things
in perspective. But it's not talked about talked about you
but I think we're now coming into a world where
we have access to all this different information, and you know,
this new generation has the ability to, you know, find
(30:21):
those important stories and tell those important stories. I've seen
a lot of people, a lot of zeitgangers out there
doing the good work and telling people about the British
Cold Guest study, either in the context of the gun conversation,
and you know, Redlining is another one of those stories
that is it's like a Keystone. It's when we got
to get into Coole Hannah Jones on this show. Right,
(30:42):
we really do, but she's amazing. But yeah, again I
think we we do definitely do people disservice, not like
we as a show, but just at the people, and
you like journalists by not at least telling people why
like sure, there's a caravan, right, but also explain to
people why there's this caravan, like celebrate there's just big
(31:02):
fans of Dodge. It's actually being paid for by Chrysler.
Check out this caravan. Huh. They're running from something, they
need help from something, and it's weird because again, you know,
there was like this Netflix show we brought up called
Go Back To Where You Came From. It's like an
Australian reality show where a lot of like sort of
anti immigrants, xenophobic people had to actually understand where the
refugees were coming from and what they were escaping, and
(31:23):
many people, oh, it started to click for them because
you know, when you're that in proximity of truth, like
you can't deny them and then you instantly oh shit, okay,
I get it. There were also like stories about um
when Ice was coming into town, like especially like small
Texas towns, like it was like a meat manufacturing town,
Like that's like a slaughterhouse town. And um, people they
(31:47):
had worked with for years decades all of a sudden
gone and then the like town locals, We're like, oh
my god, where did this person go? He was deported? No,
they they're only supposed to do the bad guys and
not realizing like this is going to affect everything and
people you know and people you care about. But it's
like that context of like we're keeping the wall up
(32:08):
to keep the bad womans out. It's easy to say
that in the Middle America, where you probably don't have
much interaction with people like immigrants, or or have firsthand
experience with the outside world or just you know, my
community was very insular. It was like the first time
I had Thai food was when I moved to Chicago.
I had no idea what it was, and he thought
it was shitty Chinese. I was like, what are these
noodles are? But it was like everybody was like Christian
(32:32):
a Christians, so like for a very long time, I
was like ignorant on like Judaism and like understand like
some of my friends were like oh, this is a
very Jewish holiday, and I was like, what does that mean?
You know, you may even Jesus Christ. Look how small
that fellas had come here. You're gonna want to see this,
mom and dad. They wear these little things. And I
(32:57):
wanted to start out talking about the Maler investigation because
we talked about this story that broke in the Washington
Post a few days back, the one that said that
Trump is not a target of a criminal investigation. He
is a subject. So he's like somehow involved. He's not
a witness, which is the most innocent, uh sort of
(33:20):
way you can be involved in an investigation, but he's
also not the target. Uh. And the immediate reaction to
that among sort of the mainstream media for the most part,
was that Mueller is sort of slow rolling this, trying
to you know, draw Trump into a interview, and that,
(33:45):
uh is what That's what we reported. We were like, yeah,
so that that must be what it is. But the
more you think about it, and I actually read an
article on the Hill from a law professor at I
think George Washington, who who I thought for a second, like,
after I read it, I was like, this must be
a Fox News talking ahead because he was like, when
(34:05):
is the media going to accept that Trump is not
a criminal target, that like the Muller investigation might not
go the way they think it's going to go. He
might not get caught up in this thing. Um. And
you know, I I looked this guy up. I was
expecting him to be like Sean Hannity's main legal expert,
(34:26):
but he is just a liberal law school person. Uh
that I guess. I guess he has written some weird
problematic stuff, Miles, you were pointing out is another weird
blog post. But I mean, I get the article has
written pretty you know, a politically just sort of like
trying to look at Look, there's not a lot adding
up so far. And this is the thing I think
even since the beginning, like whenever, you know, when we've
(34:48):
talked about should we talk about this thing and the
mother thing or not, like we've always kind of just
said on and off Mike that it's like this. A
lot of people are putting a lot of their eggs
in the basket because this is like the one logical
thing that could bring a conclusion that people would want
in terms of like some kind of karmic justice and
also kind of invalidate two thousand sixteen, which people are
(35:10):
still that's like a wound that people are still you know,
dealing with, right, So I get what the point he's
making of just sort of like yeah, because you know,
he brings up a lot of points, like people on
seeing them just like oh man, he's totally fucked or whatever.
And yeah, and even yesterday we were whenever that was
maybe the day before, I don't know, times a blur,
uh that you know, we were saying you can go
from a subject to a target to that's still the case.
(35:32):
That's still the case. That's not the main takeaway. That
shouldn't be your first instinct. And like, there were no
stories in the immediate aftermath of this revelation in the
Washington Poster in the New York Times that said what
this guy was saying, which is this is really good
news for Trump. This seems to suggest, Okay, if they
had said he was a subject but not a target
(35:52):
like when the investigation was starting, that wouldn't have been
like a good or a bad thing, because you know,
but he's been investigating him for like over a year
now and he still hasn't found anything that immediately ties
him to the crime. That's not to say that he
didn't commit a crime, and there's certainly a lot of
(36:13):
smoke there, but it just might be that they aren't
gonna be able to find the evidence right, or it's
just a bunch of people around him, we're doing the
crimes right, you know. I feel like it is like
at this point, the Maller investigation does or sort of
feel like when you're like trying to like undo a
breakup or something. You're like, well, maybe if this happens
at the work and then and then it's like that
(36:33):
doesn't work, You're like, well, maybe if I do this,
this will work. And it's been going on for so
long it's like, I mean not that we should just
accept that Trump is I mean, absolutely not, but it
does seem like, you know, every time there's a new thing,
it's like we're kind of grasping at a straw there,
and then that doesn't go through, and then it's another thing. Yeah.
I mean, the sexiest thing has been like indictments of
(36:53):
people like Paul Manafort, but even the Russians were like whatever,
those are people that they just found like fraud and
other things like that. But I think at the end
of the day. It's it's hard to speculate either direction, right, Like,
there's not enough for you to be like, oh nothing,
like like guys come off it. And there's also not
enough also to be just nutting yourself when you're like
(37:15):
so yeah, I think it really all depends on how
you look. I'm just so hesitant because this dude, Like, honestly,
I don't know what will stick to this guy that
will get get even the Republicans in the House to
say like even a bad thing about him. So regardless
of this, if you really want to go to sleep
at night and and give yourself a north star to
live by, focus on the midterms, and just work on
(37:38):
just taking back the House in the Senate like that,
that's that's really how you're going to curb his power.
Human beings can actually do stuff. Yeah, because Bobby Digital
is not going to come through and be like that
was my rismation. By the way, it would have been
another when when when the switch to Bobby Digital for
that one album? What about Bobby Muller or Bobby Okay, Mary,
(38:06):
Bobby Mueller, Bobby Durst. I know you you want to
marry Robert Durst because that was a handle. I think
you were explaining Durst is too long and fortune or
Durst three. I think three would have been a dope one.
I will say that, yes, I would marry Robert Durst.
(38:27):
Moving on, well, just because I want to die, just
because I'm looking to die, an efficient way to go.
All right, We're going to take a quick break. We'll
be right bat and we're back. We wanted to finally
cover the story of one of the good people teaching
(38:50):
our children, uh, doing the Lord's work down in Florida.
UM what her name is Di and she is a
social studies teacher at Chris River Middle School UH in Florida.
And she was known online as Kiana Dalachov, which is
the pseudonymous host of a white supremacist podcast called Unapologetic,
(39:15):
where she talked some crazy shit about race science and
uh just everything anti semitis there. The crazy thing was,
I think HuffPo outed her like March eight, and her
defense was all my comments that were quote political satire
and exaggeration, and the persona was a quote unquote hobby.
(39:40):
I'm a part time racist. I'm a I'm a hobbyist.
Race I got a hobby. Lobby actually is the lobby
store of racist exactly, and I worked there, and she
was also bragging like on her show, like she was like,
you know, I'm a teacher and I actually inject all
this ship into my teachings and things like I don't
know it. Yeah, they just don't fucking realize frequency. And
(40:00):
so basically you know that did not, uh sort of
rub parents the school district the right way, and she
only finally today resigned after much pressure. So we will
see what happens. But it's crazy, Like just to give
you an example, like the kind of ship that they're
talking on our show, there was like one episode where
there's a guy on who's like, I don't like racist either,
(40:21):
even though probably in the most technical sense of the word,
you could probably say I'm racist because I do believe
that some races of people are inferior and superior in
certain ways. I would never say black people are you know,
crap people their inferior at everything, but there are certain
things certain races can do better. Asians are way better
at math and the aggregate than white people, and white
people build cultures better than Asian people are black people,
(40:43):
and we can view it all throughout history. So that's
what her guest says, and then as a host, she
responds with I think I would align myself similarly to
your sentiment there, like I would pretty much say, yeah, okay,
if believing that certain races specialize in certain things makes
me racist, then I guess that's what I am, because
I do share your sentiment there. Everything you said like
(41:03):
meshes perfectly with what you know. I'm kind of like
thinking on the inside here. So yes, that was a
woman teaching the children social studies. Social that is double
messed up. She did say that as an adult, my
decisions are my own. My family has nothing whatsoever to
do with my social media accounts or my podcast. Okay,
(41:24):
leave my family out of it. But what's lurking in
that family's closet, you know what I mean? A hood
from them. My humbily asked for forgiveness as it was
never my intention to cause them grief while engaging in
a hobby on my personal time. I mean, the kind
of retweets that she deleted were like, white privilege proved
to me that it exists, Show me statistics that prove
(41:44):
what you just longing to get fired? Well that that's
because she was using her fake as you know Twitter name,
and then was even like, this is just just underlying
her sitting as a teacher. She says, this is a
tweet that was deleted. You know, America's education system is
designed to enable victimization when tachers are forced to learn
about institutional racism and prove it's real when it isn't.
I literally feel brain cells dying as I read this
(42:06):
bullshit hashtags any morning not the No Doubt song. So yeah,
she definitely was listening to that Sunday Morning. Yeah, so
she's out of here. So yeah. And for some reason
when I was picturing this happening in my mind, I
don't know what I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting
(42:26):
her to look so like the exact blend of all
of my teachers growing up. And yeah, she looks exactly.
If you look at this photo, you will see elements
of like other teachers. That is my teacher. Yeah, so
computer sheds like nice teacher eyes too. Yeah, she just
looks like yeah, well, never never trust a teach her
(42:49):
with a kind smile. Yeah. The lyrics to poison, Uh,
I don't know, kids, keep an eye on your teachers.
Sorry to throw that onto you kids. Not only are
you in responsible for your safety is school. Please monitor
the racist behavior. Make sure they're not intentionally injecting racist
ideals in der social str That's all the education you need, Bro,
(43:14):
I didn't go to college. Bro. All right, that's gonna
do it. For this week's weekly Zeite, guys, please like
and review the show. If you like the show, h
means the world to Miles. He needs your validation. Folks.
I hope you're having a great weekend and I will
(43:36):
talk to you Monday. By
Hello the Internet, and welcome to this episode of the
Weekly Zeitgeist. Uh. These are some of our favorite segments
from this week, all edited together into one uh NonStop
infotainment last stravaganza. Uh yeah, So, without further ado, here
(00:22):
is the Weekly Zeitgeist. So we wanted to start off
with a video that went viral over the weekend that
was made by actually the video director of dead Spin, uh,
Timothy Burke. It's like a super cut of all these
local news stations who were given the same script from
(00:43):
Sinclair Media, where they're basically making a commentary on how
the mainstream media is lying to people. Which is interesting
because the Sinclair Broadcasting Group they own right now about
like a hundred seventy three affiliate stations around the country,
and there's a merger right now that they're trying to
get pushed through which would combine them with Tribune Media,
(01:06):
and that would mean that seven out of ten households
in this country would be served by a Sinclair station
in some form. So I guess the way to think
of it is because Sinclair owns all these local news stations,
they can tell all these news stations what to say
during their broadcast. It's not ABC or NBC or CBS
or whatever. It's at the affiliate stations. The ownership is
(01:27):
the ones that are giving these directives straight down to
the anchors, and a lot of anchors were very uncomfortable
with having to do what they call these must read segments.
And this was a must read coming from on high
from Sinclair, which is a right leaning Trump friendly media group,
so leaning exactly. So you'll see when they're vampires, vampires
(01:49):
that live in cofference. Yeah, and then they're basically trying
to gaslight the entire country. So basically, this is a
super cut of one of the scary messages about fake news.
It's out there, but when you cut them on together
and realize they're all lockstep saying the same thing, it's
fucking scary. So check this out. I am Fox and
Antonio's Jessica Headley and I'm Ryan Wolf. Our greatest responsibility
(02:11):
is to serve our treasure. Valley communities, deal pass a
LUs Crucis communities, Eastern Eye with communities, Mid Michigan communities.
We're extremely proud of the quality, balanced journalism that CDs
four News produces, but in country plaguing our country, sharing
of biased and false news has to become all too
(02:34):
common on social media. More alarming, some media outlets publish
the same fake stories without checking facts first. The sharing
of biased and false news has become too common on
social media. Qualities are without checking first, unfortunatelyforms their own
(02:59):
and amend and controlling and extremely dangerous. This is extremely
dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
This is extremely dangerous to its extremely democracy. This is
extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to
(03:19):
our democracy. Yes, so that is extremely dangerous. Yeah, so
basically right now, So imagine if this merger goes through,
they will control two stations, and Tribune Media also holds
a lot of stations in swing states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina,
Ohio and also massive markets like New York, Chicago in
l a um so, more than likely all you Americans
(03:42):
night getting people out there probably live in a Sinclair market. Uh.
And most people get their news still from their local
news because they still feel they can trust it, because
they're like, oh, these are people from my town. They're
not getting their fucking orders from somewhere else. Right. That
is rapidly changing when we focus on news bias we
tend to focus on now sational news Fox News versus
you know, the right focuses on CNN. But yeah, local
(04:05):
news is widely biased in some cases. And uh, you know,
when you look at, for instance, the number of how
they report on crime, there's a huge bias towards reporting
crimes by people of color, Like the crimes they put
on the local news will be people of color, and
only like ten percent of the crimes committed are people
(04:26):
of color. Right, And I mean this is a logical
evolution from the traditional conservative media strategy, which is they
have the money. The right always has more money. So
that's you saw this happen in talk radio right once
the last time you heard a left voice on the radio. Yeah,
because we're on podcasting exactly. It's true. I think people
(04:49):
got into podcasting, and podcasting is partially growing because there
wasn't a left alternative to uh, you know, local talk radio.
And you're seeing this now like luckily, right, like our
generation and the generation that comes after us, uh doesn't
watch local news, which is good. Like this strategy. As
(05:11):
as terrifying as that video was to hear, and it
was really scary, like you know, yeah, it's like some
fucking orwelling, and it really was. But the thing to
remember is just like, Okay, don't watch local news. Wait
you don't already, great, keep not watching local news. I
think it's important though, too, because most people will have
to interact at some point with someone who watches this.
It takes it for reality. And what's crazy is a
(05:35):
few people, like in full Wars types dudes, were retweeting
it with no context, being like, check this out. And
the response from a lot of people on the right
was like, yes, you check out the mainstream media. They're
all fucking brainwashed. And then like other people in the
twitter threads would be like, you know, this is owned
by a conservative guy and it's pro Trump propaganda arm
and their weaponizing your local news. And they were like, well,
(05:57):
all I'm seeing is CBS, ABC, AN, NBC. Tell me
how this is like right leaning. They're all against Trump
and a lot of people you have to understand get it.
Affiliate news stations are independently owned, but they just have
an agreement with CBS. They'll be like, okay, funk with
you will air your shows, but we'll do the local news.
We'll put the CBS logo on it. But you don't
tell us what to run, because that's just part of,
(06:18):
you know, keeping CBS from controlling all the news everywhere.
So with these independent stations, they actually do get their
marching orders from Sinclair, which is why they post shit
like the other must runs have been stuff like the
me too movement is getting out of control and like yeah,
or just like mentioning stories that are in another state,
like you'll be in Tulsa and they'll be talking about
someone in St. Louis who got their job taken away
(06:40):
because they're conservative. So yeah. But the silver lining on
this is that the people watching local news are dying
because they are really dumb and have gutted our healthcare system.
So the only old people, and they're dying at a
rapid rate. The death rate is going up and people
(07:00):
aren't going to live as long as they did before.
So I think we're in the clear. If we all die,
we don't have to deal with this problem. Unfortunately, there
was a report released last week that says that news
that is fake travels way faster and way further on
Twitter and social media, essentially, because that's really damn That
(07:23):
is an actual study by m I T was basically
two guys who experienced the Boston bombing living in Boston,
and we're like, you know, the only place you could
get reports was on social media. So they saw, like
you know, that what they read was fake. So they
did h A. They basically ingested all of Twitter from
(07:43):
two thousand six to two thousand six and exactly uh,
and they found that stories that were fake traveled faster,
got more retweets, got more likes, And they were like, yeah,
it kind of makes sense because fake stories are able
to say whatever the funk they want to write. Yeah,
so it's just wish fulfillment, right. So I think this
(08:03):
is a problem in any medium. That that's the thing
about this particular story that they did the illustration about,
because it could go either way. They're talking about fake news,
which is something the right also talks about. So that's
why I think they're able to be like, well, what
they're talking about CNN or they say talking about Fox News.
(08:25):
We won't say pizza gate, but we'll misinform you well.
And then some of these guys have done pizza Gate stories,
some of these affiliates, Like I remember last year there
was a story where what are these like guys on
the local news was very plainly all right and just
reporting on pizza Gate as though it was a real thing.
Sinclair Executive forced their stations to run pro Trump and
(08:48):
anti Clinton segments during their evening and morning local news programs.
It's just that this was the one that they sent
out that was a word for words script that they
had to read sort of uh, you know, casting expersions
on the national news that people got, which you know,
and a lot of anchors have problem with it because
(09:10):
they're like, this is not fucking like you know what
I mean, Like the few people that are left that
are like, this is fucked Like, we can't just be wholesale.
We're counting on our We're counting on our local run
burgundies like be the voice of reason and the Edward
Armorrows to stand up. That's amazing. Yeah, I cannot wait
for that. Like I want to see them March. I
(09:30):
want to see their strike. I want to see them
former union more at ten We're hell no, we won't go. Yeah,
we'll see if we're gonna have a sick and tired
and not gonna take it anymore moment coming out on
one of these broadcasts in December Kushner bragged that the
Trump campaign had struck a deal with Sinclair executives to
(09:51):
provide exclusive interviews during the primaries and presidential campaign, and
Sinclair agreed to run them as is without any commentary. Cool.
So yeah, so that one, there's one side for you,
if nothing else, that shows the power of Sinclair Media.
That clip, and based on what they've done in the past,
it's clearly going to be a problem for democracy. The
(10:14):
Trump I want to see it go as far right
as it can go. I want to see some fucking
you know dude named like Chuck mcgonicall just be like
now more with the weather. Here's a jew. It's just
like a guy dressed like a rabbi, Like just like
my rabbi from my bar was like, you know, I
I'm feeling because I can control it. I'm feeling right.
(10:36):
Tomorrows does about the chem trail report? Right, Oh, well,
we're putting him out there and we're making him make
you gay, So good luck. So that's a stay indoors
warning from weather Rabbi, the weather Jew. So yesterday there
was a active shooter on the YouTube campus in northern California. UM.
(10:58):
It was one of the those situations, where as the
story was developing, we were getting updates on Twitter about
you know, facts that people on the ground knew that
turned out to be completely false, that it was like
a love triangle thing. I think that was started by
CNNs like expert on uh something and uh, like the
(11:21):
front page of Drudge Report is covering this to make
it seem like the shooter, which was a woman for once,
was this like right when I heard about the actor shooter,
I was like, oh my god, like who isn't It's
like it's a woman. I was like, oh, so she
has got a reason. It was like instantly really right. Uh.
(11:42):
But so the way the right is responding to the
shooter is, uh, you know, on the front page of
Drudge you see it covered as both uh you know,
portraying her as this like freaky, deaky leftist who was
into weird sexual stuff and Peter like the quote on
(12:03):
the front page of drudges wants you to be sex slaves,
which she actually like advocates for abstinence. So I don't
see how that is they too, I think something out
of contexts the system wants you to be sex slaved
or something like that. But wants you to be sex
to make it seem like she was into some weird
leftist sexual thing, but no, she was actually pro abstinence.
(12:28):
But basically her motives, it seems like we're actually based
on YouTube. She thought that YouTube was you know, demonetizing
and hiding her channel from her audience and wasn't giving
her good enough placement in search results essentially, which is
a complaint that you hear people a lot of YouTube, Yeah,
(12:49):
from a lot of YouTube users. And uh, Incredibly, when
you go to the Drudge Report, one of the top
headlines basically agrees with her. It's like oppressive YouTube censorship
policies spill over to violence, so they're actually blaming YouTube
policies for the shooter rather than being like, well, she
(13:11):
was clearly disturbed. Um so, Jared, you were talking about
you wrote an article kind of covering the way this
was covered on the right because there was just a
lot of misinformation throughout the day, right, Yeah, and then
there's a lot of stuff just made up, like that
whole peda like animal rights activist thing. Like I was
(13:33):
kind of surprised. My girlfriend is vegan and I had
no idea she was like a radical leftist right until
I saw the right wing coverage. But what interesting thing
is like, even with the Drudge like you're saying, how
they're talking about they bring up the censorship angle, right,
And it seems like even when I was reading the
post you wrote today Jared about it, like how they're
(13:55):
sort of taking the censorship tak with this too, and
they're being like, see what happens when you censor people,
Like they break and they start attacking, and like they're
using like the hashtag censorship kills the sort of way
to spin it, Like is that a pretty popular tack
that people have been taking with this. I mean, it's
it's kind of weird, Like some people um in right
wing media have really sort of stepped away from going
(14:18):
on that angle, but a lot of them, uh, are
really going into it that, you know, really trying to
prop up the fact that the shooter had uploaded videos
on her channel being like super critical of YouTube steam
monetization and like essentially like d prioritization of videos that
(14:44):
had any sort of controversial topic, which has been like
a huge thing in conservative media for the last few months.
But that was kind of weird to me because you
know that Alex Jones Is of the World have spent
the last especially couple of months really ramping up the
red rick for that being like being like, oh, if
we're censored, this is life or fucking death or something,
(15:05):
you know, and like claiming that tech companies want to
like murder Christians and stuff. It's crazy would think that
they yeah, you would think they would just like bolt running,
yeah from that storyline, but they're actually being like, yeah,
this is what happens. Uh. That top story on Drudge
Report links through to a PJ Media story where there
(15:29):
they talk about how she was motivated by censorship of
her YouTube channel and then talk about a Trump supporting
woman whose channel was like hidden they say, and just yeah,
connecting themselves to the complaints of a shooter. Like rather
than being like, wow, this has gotten way out of hand,
(15:50):
they're just like kind of on board with it. Yeah.
And I think it's because like a lot of alternative
media types, like the type of content creators that like
will never be on Fox News or never be you know,
talking to Russia Limbaugh, all they have as a YouTube channel,
The thought of like getting demonetized on YouTube is so
it's their life, and uh, I think what we're seeing
(16:15):
is them getting incredibly desperate because it takes a lot
of mental gymnastics, is at least like from my perspective,
to align yourself with a shooter and sort of you know,
issue this sort of dark I don't want to say warning,
but you know what I mean, where is well there
is insisting that insisting like this is what you get
(16:36):
when you try to do this right. I mean, my
own YouTube videos have um, you know, dozens of hits
and um, you know, I don't have many subscribers, but
it makes me, it makes me have a murderous blood
lusts and that's totally justified. Totally yeah. I mean, your
art is your life, and they're trying to take away
(16:57):
your life and therefore, uh no, it one thing that
I actually agree with on the organization. By the way,
when I say Drudge has this, Drudge just organizes different
stories and then rewrites the headlines for them. So I'm
not saying Drudge is writing these things. He's organizing the stories,
but he has underneath, like the top story claiming you know,
(17:19):
this is YouTube's doing and they had it coming. He
has a story about how basically the two sides in
America are more polarized than they've ever been. This is
a claim by a physicist, which is something you hear
a lot, but this physicist, UH points out that we're
consuming more news than we've ever consumed before, and we're
(17:40):
getting more and more polarized, like even now, we're getting
more polarized than we were even like a couple of
months ago. And I think that really seems to be
I don't know, it seems like we've turned a corner.
Like we we were talking about the Q and on
thing being fringe, but there was just a study that
I talked about earlier this week where people ingested all
(18:01):
of Twitter from UH two thousand six to two sixteen
and looked at which stories traveled the most, and the
stories that were lies traveled the best because they were
wish fulfillment to people who, you know, wanted their beliefs confirmed.
And I just think that as we get more polarized,
the more we need fake stories to be true to
(18:22):
confirm our beliefs. So there's going to be this economy
of fake news stories that just kind of bubbles up
because that's what the sort of landscape demands. All Right,
We're gonna take a quick break and we'll be right back,
(18:47):
and we're back. The debate surrounding news I feel like
hasn't evolved with the world we now live in. I
think we still talk about stories and like whether they're
true or false, Like the Sinclair thing they were, like,
you know a lot of people have bias and tell
these fake stories just based on their bias, and um
(19:10):
So I've talked before about how nine eleven. The big
problem with our ability to stop the September eleventh attacks
and in the aftermath of the September eleventh attacks was
our ability to basically sort through all the data that
we had. Like during the Cold War, intelligence gathering was
(19:30):
a big thing. It was just like you got these
few scraps from your Russian spies and then like you
put them together into a coherent picture. And suddenly, with
the advent of like information technology, we had just fire
hoses of information coming at us, and we didn't know
how to sort through all that information. And that made
it so that we didn't get to the nine eleven
(19:54):
attackers before it happened, because we knew about that, Like
that was a story you heard in the aftermath, like
how did we knew about these people, but we didn't
stop them. It was because they were like one of
thousands of things we knew about. And I feel like
the same thing is happening with how we addressed news,
Like we have just all this news coming at us now,
(20:16):
and the question is not like whether some of it
is false or whether some of it is true all
the time, but rather like what we choose to focus on,
And like this story about the border caravan, you know,
people are focusing on this like it is this unprecedented
thing and it's something that's happened every year, and yes
(20:39):
it's happening, and yet like they're not making the story up,
but by focusing on it, they're misleading you. It's basically well,
and it's a story that is like we now have
a president where this kind of story is politically advantageous
to the president because he can weaponize and distort it
to evoke like this idea that like if it's you know,
other countries they have refugees arriving on boats and they're like, oh,
(21:01):
people are just crashing the shores and trying to get
in our country or or storming the gates of our
borders and things like that, and this is like kind
of that perfect imagery that he needs, and then he
can like pump his own dick up and be like, oh,
you know, I told Mexico to break up the caravans,
and they did because I told him, And now we'll
have the military there to fucking shoot people who are
seeking political sound like, what the funk are you going
on about? It's it's very weird. And I think another
(21:24):
reason too, is we also don't actually we just focus
on what is happening and not focusing on what is
the root cause. Right, So, like, if it's these migrants,
why don't you doing some more stories about Honduras and
what it is these people are trying to escape because
that might resonate or that might at least help people
understand the world we live in, because everything isn't just
(21:45):
what happened or what might happen this season on the
New Jersey Shore, which I am very much interested in,
but I also want to know why people are moving
and with the situations they're trying to escape. And I
think that's another way our media does betray us, or
as a disservice, is might not actually focusing on like, oh, well,
why is this happening, not just it is happening, just
being like oh that's and also overarching, like we need
(22:08):
to look at statistics, like just because the local news
reports a crime doesn't mean that there aren't fewer crimes happening.
Like crime is at an all time low, but the
way that people talk on Fox News and just looking
at your local news, you would never suspect that crime
is an all time low. Way, but it's at an
(22:28):
all time low, and it has been going down for
years because of you know a number of different factors
that people never mentioned, and they don't mention those overall
statistical trends because it's more interesting and just more consumable
to tell the bite size stories of the crimes. Right.
I feel like we've lost a lot of empathy in
(22:48):
this nation, and there's no focus on mental health. I
think like a lot of these like news channels, they
always yeah, I agree, like it's sensationalize is crime, but
some some people just need like mental health services. And
instead of just being like this is a crazy man,
like hey, wait, like someone who the system failed. Wait
a second, you know, yeah, man too brings that up,
(23:11):
you know, sensationalizing mental health, that's pretty deep when Kanye
came out. I mean, everything we're saying is basically summarizing
the points made an anchor man. They don't give away
the secret to our philosophical north star is little no effect.
(23:32):
But yeah, I think that's another reason too that we
we never really give people context, like we expect people
to already know or we have to explain to them,
like you know, especially when you think about how segregation
works in this country, A lot of people just go, oh,
like an unarmed black person was shot or whatever, and
not many people understand how through like legal segregation, through
(23:53):
like housing initiatives in this country and the highways. Yeah exactly,
we were redlining. We were making sure and and we
talked about this yesterday. But redlining was the practice of
identifying neighborhoods that were undesirable or where people would not
get loans and things, basically essentially to just say, keep
black people in these sections, or keep minorities in these neighborhoods,
(24:14):
and if they try and get out, just deny them
alone or give it at such a rate that it's
not really it's an untenable situation for them. And yeah, exactly,
And what people don't realize is that, like especially like
as a lot of black people migrated to the North
out of the South in the early twentieth century for like,
you know, industrial centers like my grandparents did. They moved
(24:34):
to Chicago from the South, Chicago the Dan Ryan and
in those neighborhoods. The way they were dealing with this
influx of of people of color was, you know, they've
just created these very distinct neighborhoods that they segregated people.
And the segregation is much more intense. Like you think, oh,
in the South, it must be crazy. No, it's actually
like the Northeast and ship and some in the in
(24:56):
the Midwest, that's where it's the most pronounced. This American
Life did under cover story where they sent people. They
send people to enquire about apartments in New York City,
and it was white couple and then a black couple.
And they would go and the black couple had better credit,
better all the things that the landlord was supposed to
(25:19):
be looking for, and they would be turned away and
the white couple would be shown the apartment and basically
courted to go there. And so that's the way that
these things are enforced. It's like sort of a soft
form of segregation where it or like an invisible form
of segregation. It's not soft in the sense that it's
easy to get around well, and people who don't realize,
(25:39):
they're like, oh, those people are just poor and that's
why they live there. It's like, no, that area is
designed to keep people in there and not coming into
other areas, because whether it's like blockbusting practices or like
black people would begin to move into white places, and
those realtors would hire black people to create this illusion
of like a black takeover and like being like, hey,
you probably want like to a white family, Hey, you
probably want to sell your home, and then jack up
(26:01):
the price for a black family to buy that home. Also,
like you also think about how schools and services get funded.
A lot of it's from property taxes too, So if
you're in the hood, there's not a lot of tax
revenue being generated, so that means the schools are underfunded.
That means the schools get more segregated. And again we
just want to act like it's it's all these other things. Again,
I think a lot of the times when we present stories,
(26:21):
people don't fully understand the context of even how we
get the situation. And like, one other point I want
to bring up is that, like one theory that is
going around is that obviously not it's like the theory,
but you know a lot of people are sort of like,
why does you know black white segregation have any kind
of bearing or influence on fatal police shootings? What's that
segregated Black communities are just more heavily policed than others.
(26:43):
And in a study from thirteen showed that in Milwaukee
in Wisconsin has the highest like sort of like racism
racial index. Uh. It's it's a state racism index where
it basically takes uh it looks at things like residential segregation,
disparities and educational attainment and employment status, economic status, incarceration status. Uh,
(27:03):
and they score each of these Wisconsin tops the list
for all of these for when you when they factor
all these things in and when they looked at Milwaukee specifically,
the state's largest city, half of black men between the
ages thirty and forty have been in jail at some
point in their lives and the city zip code five
three two oh six black and has the highest incarceration
rate like anything in any county there. So basically what
(27:26):
happens is the more segregated a place becomes your only
underlying people's biases that are fed by the news. Where
if you if you think, oh, you're only showing news
about people of color or like the violence being bad
in like uh in these neighborhoods, then immediately the police
are going to be like, oh, well, now I'm in
a black neighborhood. I'm not in oh I deal with
regular people who might not have to get shot. I'm
immediately on the defense because now I'm in this crazy thing.
(27:48):
And like there's all these subtle factors all play into
sort of how we relate to the world. And yeah,
I think it's a very important thing for people to
kind of realize all of these stories have much more
complex context. I feel like that's really like I lived
in Chicago for about ten years before I moved out here,
and like Rama Manual is just systematically shutting down schools
like an impoverish neighborhoods, and then I just pulled it up,
(28:10):
like Chicago closes more schools and black neighborhood Chicago students
had budget cuts. It's all of this stuff, like and
then there are these like some of my friends were teachers,
and I don't know if this is true or not,
but they were telling me that um Ram had this
like initiative of like, look, we're building new schools and
new charter schools, but these schools were empty because he
was adding them in neighborhoods that didn't need them, or
(28:31):
like prominent neighborhoods where like neighborhoods on the West Side
or even the south side, and and some up in
the north like an uptown where you really needed it,
they weren't getting them and he was just shutting them down. Yeah,
I mean, and in Chicago, like a story that I
hadn't really connected to the current spade of violence and
(28:51):
murder was that they shut the Cabrini Green housing project
down like a number of years ago, and that was
a high crime area, but they basically turned it into
high income a living area and didn't give all the
poor people who had lived there before a place to go.
So like that created just a horrible Yeah. So I
(29:14):
don't know, these are, uh, we're kind of all over
the map, but I do just want to talk about
Jeff Bezos. You're just listening in Jeff Bezos. It was
a problem Jeff, he started this whole thing. But I
do think, you know, it's important to keep in mind
that the our role as news consumers is not just
to look at individual stories and determine, you know, whether
(29:37):
they're true or not, but to actually find the context.
And you know, the Redlining story is a story that
I just learned about on that this American Life episode
like four or five years ago, and I believe that
I couldn't believe that I hadn't been told that that's
like the most important story of the twentieth century when
(29:59):
it us to like how American life has lived in
the current world, and it puts all these different things
in perspective. But it's not talked about talked about you
but I think we're now coming into a world where
we have access to all this different information, and you know,
this new generation has the ability to, you know, find
(30:21):
those important stories and tell those important stories. I've seen
a lot of people, a lot of zeitgangers out there
doing the good work and telling people about the British
Cold Guest study, either in the context of the gun conversation,
and you know, Redlining is another one of those stories
that is it's like a Keystone. It's when we got
to get into Coole Hannah Jones on this show. Right,
(30:42):
we really do, but she's amazing. But yeah, again I
think we we do definitely do people disservice, not like
we as a show, but just at the people, and
you like journalists by not at least telling people why
like sure, there's a caravan, right, but also explain to
people why there's this caravan, like celebrate there's just big
(31:02):
fans of Dodge. It's actually being paid for by Chrysler.
Check out this caravan. Huh. They're running from something, they
need help from something, and it's weird because again, you know,
there was like this Netflix show we brought up called
Go Back To Where You Came From. It's like an
Australian reality show where a lot of like sort of
anti immigrants, xenophobic people had to actually understand where the
refugees were coming from and what they were escaping, and
(31:23):
many people, oh, it started to click for them because
you know, when you're that in proximity of truth, like
you can't deny them and then you instantly oh shit, okay,
I get it. There were also like stories about um
when Ice was coming into town, like especially like small
Texas towns, like it was like a meat manufacturing town,
Like that's like a slaughterhouse town. And um, people they
(31:47):
had worked with for years decades all of a sudden
gone and then the like town locals, We're like, oh
my god, where did this person go? He was deported? No,
they they're only supposed to do the bad guys and
not realizing like this is going to affect everything and
people you know and people you care about. But it's
like that context of like we're keeping the wall up
(32:08):
to keep the bad womans out. It's easy to say
that in the Middle America, where you probably don't have
much interaction with people like immigrants, or or have firsthand
experience with the outside world or just you know, my
community was very insular. It was like the first time
I had Thai food was when I moved to Chicago.
I had no idea what it was, and he thought
it was shitty Chinese. I was like, what are these
noodles are? But it was like everybody was like Christian
(32:32):
a Christians, so like for a very long time, I
was like ignorant on like Judaism and like understand like
some of my friends were like oh, this is a
very Jewish holiday, and I was like, what does that mean?
You know, you may even Jesus Christ. Look how small
that fellas had come here. You're gonna want to see this,
mom and dad. They wear these little things. And I
(32:57):
wanted to start out talking about the Maler investigation because
we talked about this story that broke in the Washington
Post a few days back, the one that said that
Trump is not a target of a criminal investigation. He
is a subject. So he's like somehow involved. He's not
a witness, which is the most innocent, uh sort of
(33:20):
way you can be involved in an investigation, but he's
also not the target. Uh. And the immediate reaction to
that among sort of the mainstream media for the most part,
was that Mueller is sort of slow rolling this, trying
to you know, draw Trump into a interview, and that,
(33:45):
uh is what That's what we reported. We were like, yeah,
so that that must be what it is. But the
more you think about it, and I actually read an
article on the Hill from a law professor at I
think George Washington, who who I thought for a second, like,
after I read it, I was like, this must be
a Fox News talking ahead because he was like, when
(34:05):
is the media going to accept that Trump is not
a criminal target, that like the Muller investigation might not
go the way they think it's going to go. He
might not get caught up in this thing. Um. And
you know, I I looked this guy up. I was
expecting him to be like Sean Hannity's main legal expert,
(34:26):
but he is just a liberal law school person. Uh
that I guess. I guess he has written some weird
problematic stuff, Miles, you were pointing out is another weird
blog post. But I mean, I get the article has
written pretty you know, a politically just sort of like
trying to look at Look, there's not a lot adding
up so far. And this is the thing I think
even since the beginning, like whenever, you know, when we've
(34:48):
talked about should we talk about this thing and the
mother thing or not, like we've always kind of just
said on and off Mike that it's like this. A
lot of people are putting a lot of their eggs
in the basket because this is like the one logical
thing that could bring a conclusion that people would want
in terms of like some kind of karmic justice and
also kind of invalidate two thousand sixteen, which people are
(35:10):
still that's like a wound that people are still you know,
dealing with, right, So I get what the point he's
making of just sort of like yeah, because you know,
he brings up a lot of points, like people on
seeing them just like oh man, he's totally fucked or whatever.
And yeah, and even yesterday we were whenever that was
maybe the day before, I don't know, times a blur,
uh that you know, we were saying you can go
from a subject to a target to that's still the case.
(35:32):
That's still the case. That's not the main takeaway. That
shouldn't be your first instinct. And like, there were no
stories in the immediate aftermath of this revelation in the
Washington Poster in the New York Times that said what
this guy was saying, which is this is really good
news for Trump. This seems to suggest, Okay, if they
had said he was a subject but not a target
(35:52):
like when the investigation was starting, that wouldn't have been
like a good or a bad thing, because you know,
but he's been investigating him for like over a year
now and he still hasn't found anything that immediately ties
him to the crime. That's not to say that he
didn't commit a crime, and there's certainly a lot of
(36:13):
smoke there, but it just might be that they aren't
gonna be able to find the evidence right, or it's
just a bunch of people around him, we're doing the
crimes right, you know. I feel like it is like
at this point, the Maller investigation does or sort of
feel like when you're like trying to like undo a
breakup or something. You're like, well, maybe if this happens
at the work and then and then it's like that
(36:33):
doesn't work, You're like, well, maybe if I do this,
this will work. And it's been going on for so
long it's like, I mean not that we should just
accept that Trump is I mean, absolutely not, but it
does seem like, you know, every time there's a new thing,
it's like we're kind of grasping at a straw there,
and then that doesn't go through, and then it's another thing. Yeah.
I mean, the sexiest thing has been like indictments of
(36:53):
people like Paul Manafort, but even the Russians were like whatever,
those are people that they just found like fraud and
other things like that. But I think at the end
of the day. It's it's hard to speculate either direction, right, Like,
there's not enough for you to be like, oh nothing,
like like guys come off it. And there's also not
enough also to be just nutting yourself when you're like
(37:15):
so yeah, I think it really all depends on how
you look. I'm just so hesitant because this dude, Like, honestly,
I don't know what will stick to this guy that
will get get even the Republicans in the House to
say like even a bad thing about him. So regardless
of this, if you really want to go to sleep
at night and and give yourself a north star to
live by, focus on the midterms, and just work on
(37:38):
just taking back the House in the Senate like that,
that's that's really how you're going to curb his power.
Human beings can actually do stuff. Yeah, because Bobby Digital
is not going to come through and be like that
was my rismation. By the way, it would have been
another when when when the switch to Bobby Digital for
that one album? What about Bobby Muller or Bobby Okay, Mary,
(38:06):
Bobby Mueller, Bobby Durst. I know you you want to
marry Robert Durst because that was a handle. I think
you were explaining Durst is too long and fortune or
Durst three. I think three would have been a dope one.
I will say that, yes, I would marry Robert Durst.
(38:27):
Moving on, well, just because I want to die, just
because I'm looking to die, an efficient way to go.
All right, We're going to take a quick break. We'll
be right bat and we're back. We wanted to finally
cover the story of one of the good people teaching
(38:50):
our children, uh, doing the Lord's work down in Florida.
UM what her name is Di and she is a
social studies teacher at Chris River Middle School UH in Florida.
And she was known online as Kiana Dalachov, which is
the pseudonymous host of a white supremacist podcast called Unapologetic,
(39:15):
where she talked some crazy shit about race science and
uh just everything anti semitis there. The crazy thing was,
I think HuffPo outed her like March eight, and her
defense was all my comments that were quote political satire
and exaggeration, and the persona was a quote unquote hobby.
(39:40):
I'm a part time racist. I'm a I'm a hobbyist.
Race I got a hobby. Lobby actually is the lobby
store of racist exactly, and I worked there, and she
was also bragging like on her show, like she was like,
you know, I'm a teacher and I actually inject all
this ship into my teachings and things like I don't
know it. Yeah, they just don't fucking realize frequency. And
(40:00):
so basically you know that did not, uh sort of
rub parents the school district the right way, and she
only finally today resigned after much pressure. So we will
see what happens. But it's crazy, Like just to give
you an example, like the kind of ship that they're
talking on our show, there was like one episode where
there's a guy on who's like, I don't like racist either,
(40:21):
even though probably in the most technical sense of the word,
you could probably say I'm racist because I do believe
that some races of people are inferior and superior in
certain ways. I would never say black people are you know,
crap people their inferior at everything, but there are certain
things certain races can do better. Asians are way better
at math and the aggregate than white people, and white
people build cultures better than Asian people are black people,
(40:43):
and we can view it all throughout history. So that's
what her guest says, and then as a host, she
responds with I think I would align myself similarly to
your sentiment there, like I would pretty much say, yeah, okay,
if believing that certain races specialize in certain things makes
me racist, then I guess that's what I am, because
I do share your sentiment there. Everything you said like
(41:03):
meshes perfectly with what you know. I'm kind of like
thinking on the inside here. So yes, that was a
woman teaching the children social studies. Social that is double
messed up. She did say that as an adult, my
decisions are my own. My family has nothing whatsoever to
do with my social media accounts or my podcast. Okay,
(41:24):
leave my family out of it. But what's lurking in
that family's closet, you know what I mean? A hood
from them. My humbily asked for forgiveness as it was
never my intention to cause them grief while engaging in
a hobby on my personal time. I mean, the kind
of retweets that she deleted were like, white privilege proved
to me that it exists, Show me statistics that prove
(41:44):
what you just longing to get fired? Well that that's
because she was using her fake as you know Twitter name,
and then was even like, this is just just underlying
her sitting as a teacher. She says, this is a
tweet that was deleted. You know, America's education system is
designed to enable victimization when tachers are forced to learn
about institutional racism and prove it's real when it isn't.
I literally feel brain cells dying as I read this
(42:06):
bullshit hashtags any morning not the No Doubt song. So yeah,
she definitely was listening to that Sunday Morning. Yeah, so
she's out of here. So yeah. And for some reason
when I was picturing this happening in my mind, I
don't know what I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting
(42:26):
her to look so like the exact blend of all
of my teachers growing up. And yeah, she looks exactly.
If you look at this photo, you will see elements
of like other teachers. That is my teacher. Yeah, so
computer sheds like nice teacher eyes too. Yeah, she just
looks like yeah, well, never never trust a teach her
(42:49):
with a kind smile. Yeah. The lyrics to poison, Uh,
I don't know, kids, keep an eye on your teachers.
Sorry to throw that onto you kids. Not only are
you in responsible for your safety is school. Please monitor
the racist behavior. Make sure they're not intentionally injecting racist
ideals in der social str That's all the education you need, Bro,
(43:14):
I didn't go to college. Bro. All right, that's gonna
do it. For this week's weekly Zeite, guys, please like
and review the show. If you like the show, h
means the world to Miles. He needs your validation. Folks.
I hope you're having a great weekend and I will
(43:36):
talk to you Monday. By
The Daily Zeitgeist News
Hosts And Creators
Jack O'Brien
Miles Gray
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